2. Try to devise a scale or some kind of quantification for the variants of the variable (a) found in words like bat, bad, back, bag, and bang. You will have to note quite fine phonetic differences. What difficulties arise? Try to place your own pronunciations of the vowels in these words on the scale as well as the pronunciations of some other people you know. In doing this kind of task, what social judgments do you yourself make of the variants?
3. Which linguistic variables might be usefully investigated in the part of the world in which you live; that is, what kinds of variation have you noticed around you, and how might you characterize the variation using the con- cept of the ‘linguistic variable’?
4. I have suggested that certain linguistic variables are particularly marked, i.e., speakers and listeners are acutely aware of them. We immediately notice either the presence or absence of something. One consequence is that all a speaker must do is use a single instance of the ‘wrong’ variant, e.g., drop an h when he or she should not, to reveal that the middle-class style being used is actually overlaid on a working-class one. Can you think of other examples of this phenomenon, when someone ‘gives himself or herself away’ by using a linguistic feature in such a way? (Note that it is also possible to give away your middle-class or upper-class origins while pretending to be working class.) 5. In his Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer says the following of the
Knight:
He nevere yet no vileyne ne sayde In al his lyf unto no maner wight.
This use of multiple negation was common in both Old English and Middle English. Although it still persists, it is now highly marked as nonstandard.
Try to find out why this variant of negation has fallen into such disfavor (and who actually disfavors it). See Crystal (1984), Bauer and Trudgill (1998), and Wardhaugh (1999).
by Hindu caste membership with Brahmans at the top, then Rajputs (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants), and several groups of artisans and laborers lower down.
At the bottom are three untouchable castes: Chamars (landless laborers), Jatia Chamars (leather workers and shoe makers), and Bhangis (sweepers). The latter are restricted to living in certain neighborhoods and have less freedom to move in the village than do members of the upper castes. Ten percent of the popula- tion are not Hindus but Muslims; they are outside the caste system.
So far as language is concerned, certain characteristics of the Khalapur village dialect are clear markers of social-group membership. For example, Bhangis do not make certain phonological contrasts that speakers of all the other castes make. Chamars and Jatia Chamars also lack certain phonological contrasts made by all others, and some, in attempting to make such a contrast, actually hypercorrect; that is, they over-extend a particular usage in trying to emulate others. Jatia Chamars have a characteristic pronunciation of words that end in [æ] in all other village varieties. Each of the three untouchable castes there- fore has speech characteristics that clearly set it off both from the other two untouchable castes and from the touchable castes in the village. Muslim speech resembles that of the touchable classes.
An anomaly is that the variety of village speech spoken by the lowest caste, the Bhangis, is closest to the dialect of the region in which Khalapur is situated.
This fact constrains members of the upper castes in their use of the regional dialect since using it would make them sound like untouchables. In their lin- guistic usage therefore they are forced to innovate away from the regional variety.
Since untouchables apparently try to emulate the touchables, the direction of innovation for all groups in Khalapur is away from the regional variety with the innovations prompted, of course, by different needs: the touchables’ need to signal their clear distinction from the untouchables, and the untouchables’
attempt to reduce that distinction as much as possible.
This study quite clearly shows a direct relationship between linguistic vari- ation and caste membership. If we know certain things about one, we can predict certain things about the other. It is just such connections or correlations that interest sociolinguists working with the linguistic variable. What they seek are measures of social variation to which they can relate the kinds of linguistic variation they observe. However, caste, with its sharp social stratifications, is useless as a measure of social variation outside a few non-Western societies.
Consequently, the problem becomes one of finding factors in society that show a relationship to such matters as whether or not an individual says singing or singin’, he go or he goes, or He doesn’t know anything or He don’t know nothing.
Once a linguistic variable has been identified, the next issue becomes that of collecting data concerning its variants in such a way that we can draw certain conclusions about the social distribution of these variants. To draw such conclu- sions, we must be able to relate the variants in some way to quantifiable factors in society, e.g., social-class membership, gender, age, ethnicity, and so on. As we will see, there are numerous difficulties in attempting this task, but considerable progress has been made in overcoming them, particularly as studies have built on those that have gone before in such a way as to strengthen the quality of the work done in this area of sociolinguistics.
While it is fairly easy to relate the occurrences of the variants of a linguistic variable to factors such as gender and age, relating them to factors such as race and ethnicity is somewhat more troublesome since these are much more subjective in nature and less easily quantifiable. But the most complicated factor of all is social-class membership, if we consider ‘social class’ to be a useful concept to apply in stratifying society – and few indeed would deny its relevance! Sociolo- gists use a number of different scales for classifying people when they attempt to place individuals somewhere within a social system. An occupational scale may divide people into a number of categories as follows: major professionals and executives of large businesses; lesser professionals and executives of medium- sized businesses; semi-professionals; technicians and owners of small businesses;
skilled workers; semi-skilled workers; and unskilled workers. An educational scale may employ the following categories: graduate or professional education;
college or university degree; attendance at college or university but no degree;
high school graduation; some high school education; and less than seven years of formal education. Income level as well as source of income are important factors in any classification system that focuses on how much money people have. Likewise, in considering where people live, investigators must concern themselves with both the type of housing and its location.
In assigning individuals to social classes, investigators may use any or all of the above criteria (and others too) and assign different weights to them. Accord- ingly, the resulting social-class designation given to any individual may differ from study to study. We can also see how social class itself is a sociological construct; people probably do not classify themselves as members of groups defined by such criteria. Wolfram and Fasold (1974, p. 44) point out that ‘there are other objective approaches [to establishing social groupings] not exclusively dependent on socio-economic ranking. . . . An investigator may look at such things as church membership, leisure-time activities, or community organizations.’ They admit that such alternative approaches are not at all simple to devise but argue that a classification so obtained is probably more directly related to social class than the simple measurement of economic factors. We should note that there is a current emphasis on ‘lifestyle’ in classifying people, so obviously patterns of consumption of goods and appearance are important for a number of people in arriving at some kind of social classification.
Alternative approaches to using a somewhat simple social-class scale are, however, still rather infrequent. What we find is that people are assigned to social classes through the use of composite scores derived from various scales which ‘measure’ some of the factors mentioned above. It is also the case that the actual scales used must necessarily vary from community to community since exactly the same characteristics cannot serve to classify people in England and the United States or in New England and New Mexico. However, as I have indicated, nearly all such scales take into account such matters as educational achievement, professional training, occupation (sometimes parental occupation too), ‘blue’- or ‘white’-collar work, salary or income level, source of that salary, income, or wage (this difference also being important), gender, age, residential area, race, and ethnicity. Weights are then assigned to each of these and some kind of unitary scale is devised so that individuals can be fitted into slots
carrying such designations as ‘upper class,’ ‘middle class,’ ‘lower working class,’
and so on. Sometimes the stratifications, or gradations, are few (‘upper’ vs.
‘middle’ class), but at other times they are many (‘upper middle’ vs. ‘middle middle’ class). Most work in sociolinguistics has drawn on commonly used uni- tary scales of this kind to designate the social-class membership of individuals in an attempt to describe the characteristic linguistic behavior of various social classes.
In his study of linguistic variation in New York City, Labov (1966) used the three criteria of education, occupation, and income to set up ten social classes.
His class 0, his lower class, had grade school education or less, were laborers, and found it difficult to make ends meet. His classes 1 to 5, his working class, had had some high school education, were blue-collar workers, but earned enough to own such things as cars. His classes 6 to 8, his lower middle class, were high school graduates and semi-professional and white-collar workers who could send their children to college. His highest class 9, his upper middle class, were well educated and professional or business-oriented. In this classification system for people in the United States about 10 percent of the population are said to be lower class, about 40 percent working class, another 40 percent lower middle class, and the remaining 10 percent fall into the upper middle class or an upper class, the latter not included in Labov’s study. In his later study (2001) of variation in Philadelphia Labov used a socio-economic index based on occupa- tion, education, and house value.
In his study of linguistic variation in Norwich, England, Trudgill (1974) dis- tinguishes five social classes: middle middle class (MMC), lower middle class (LMC), upper working class (UWC), middle working class (MWC), and lower working class (LWC). Trudgill interviewed ten speakers from each of five elec- toral wards in Norwich plus ten school-age children from two schools. These sixty informants were then classified on six factors, each of which was scored on a six-point scale (0–5): occupation, education, income, type of housing, locality, and father’s occupation. Trudgill himself decided the cut-off points among his classes. In doing so, he shows a certain circularity. His lower working class is defined as those who use certain linguistic features (e.g., he go) more than 80 percent of the time. Out of the total possible score of 30 on his com- bined scales, those scoring 6 or less fall into this category. Members of Trudgill’s middle middle class always use he goes, and that behavior is typical of those scoring 19 or more. His study is an attempt to relate linguistic behavior to social class, but he uses linguistic behavior to assign membership in social class. What we can be sure of is that there is a difference in linguistic behavior between those at the top and bottom of Trudgill’s 30-point scale, but this difference is not one that has been established completely independently because of the underlying circularity.
Shuy’s Detroit study (Shuy et al., 1968) attempted to sample the speech of that city using a sample of 702 informants. Eleven field workers collected the data by means of a questionnaire over a period of ten weeks. They assigned each of their informants to a social class using three sets of criteria: amount of education, occupation, and place of residence. Each informant was ranked on a six- or seven-point scale for each set, the rankings were weighted (multiplied
by 5 for education, 9 for occupation, and 6 for residence), and each informant was given a social-class placement. Four social-class designations were used:
upper middle class, those with scores of 20– 48; lower middle class, those with scores of 49–77; upper working class, those with scores of 78–106; and lower working class, those with scores of 107–134.
There are some serious drawbacks to using social-class designations of this kind. As Bainbridge (1994, p. 4023) says:
While sociolinguists without number have documented class-related variation in speech, hardly any of them asked themselves what social class was. They treated class as a key independent variable, with variations in speech dependent upon class variations, yet they never considered the meaning of the independent variable. In consequence, they seldom attempted anything like a theory of why class should have an impact, and even more rarely examined their measures of class to see if they were methodologically defensible.
Woolard (1985, p. 738) expresses a similar view: ‘sociolinguists have often borrowed sociological concepts in an ad hoc and unreflecting fashion, not usu- ally considering critically the implicit theoretical frameworks that are imported.’
She adds (p. 739), ‘However, to say that our underlying social theories are in need of examination, elaboration, or reconsideration is not to say that the work sociolinguists have done or the concepts we have employed are without merit.’
(See also Horvath’s comment cited on p. 11.)
Chambers (2003, ch. 2) wrestles with the problem of class as a category and with what he calls the ‘fuzziness’ inherent in class boundaries. He admits (p. 44) that sociolinguists ‘often rely on their intuitions in assigning social classes to individuals in the sample population in their studies,’ but avers (p. 44) that any such ‘judgment sample’ made by an experienced sociolinguist familiar with the region under investigation ‘carries few risks.’ For Chambers it is apparently enough that the sociolinguist has an intuitive grasp of the social-class compo- sition of the group being investigated and chooses representative (or ‘prototypical’) individuals using his or her own best judgment. He admits that this is not the preferred sociological method and reveals an ‘abyss between the sampling methods of sociolinguistic surveys and the type of survey represented by opinion polls’
(p. 45). He claims, however, that the particular sampling methods of sociolin- guistic investigation have been justified by their results, adding (p. 54) that the social stratification that interests sociolinguists is ‘often crystal clear.’
Chambers’ view is an optimistic one. ‘Class’ is not a transparent concept and
‘fuzziness’ is ever present (see Ash, 2002, for an extended discussion). Can you clearly assign any John Doe or Jane Doe a class membership? Are the same criteria applicable to all individuals in society, e.g., to both the black and white inhabitants of northern cities in the United States, and to both recent immi- grants to London and the residents of Mayfair? Is class structure the same in both the industrialized and non-industrialized parts of the same society? Do the criteria for classification apply equally to John Doe and Jane Doe? Are the different generations fairly treated? Another way of looking at John Doe is to try to specify what kinds of groups he belongs to and then relate his various uses of language to membership in these groups. The obvious disadvantage of such
an approach is the lack of generalizability of the results: we might be able to say a lot about the linguistic behavior of John Doe vis-à-vis his membership in these groups, but we would not be able to say anything at all about anyone else’s linguistic behavior. We can contrast this result with the statements we can make from using the aforementioned social-class designations: they say some- thing about the linguistic usage of the ‘middle middle class’ without assuring us that there is really such an entity as that class; nor do they guarantee us that we can ever find a typical member.
One of the major problems in talking about social class is that social space is multi-dimensional whereas systems of social classification are one-dimensional.
As we have seen, at any particular moment, an individual locates himself or herself in social space according to the factors that are relevant to him or her at that moment. While he or she may indeed have certain feelings about being a member of the lower middle class, at any moment it might be more important to be female, or to be a member of a particular church or ethnic group, or to be an in-patient in a hospital, or to be a sister-in-law. That is, self-identification or role-playing may be far more important than some kind of fixed social-class labeling. There need not, of course, be serious conflict between the two ap- proaches. Certain kinds of self-identification and roles to be played may correl- ate quite closely with certain social-class labels, and they may be more ‘real’
and immediate to people, in the sense of accounting more accurately for their behavior from moment to moment.
The work of Labov, Trudgill, and others tries to describe the speech charac- teristics of members of social groups, that is, various sociolects. Traditionally, linguists have been interested in idiolects, the speech characteristics and lin- guistic behavior of individuals. They have also maintained that, once free variation is taken into account, an idiolect is highly representative of the linguistic behavior of all the speakers of that language. In fact, that is usually the approach linguists adopt in studying an exotic language: they find a speaker who is willing to serve as an informant, and they attempt to describe that speaker’s language using appropriate field methods. They usually show little hesitation in generalizing their statements about that speaker’s linguistic behavior to all speakers of the language. Sociolects, however, are statements about group norms arrived at through counting and averaging. To the extent that the groups are real, that is, that the members actually feel that they do belong to a group, a sociolect has validity; to the extent that they are not, it is just an artifact. In the extremely complex societies in which most of us live, there must always be some question as to the reality of any kind of social grouping: each of us experiences society differently, multiple-group membership is normal, and both change and stability seem to be natural conditions of our existence. We must therefore exercise a certain caution about interpreting any claims made about ‘lower working-class speech,’ ‘upper middle-class speech,’ or the speech of any other social group designated with a class label – or any label for that matter.
Distinguishing among social classes in complex modern urban societies is probably becoming more and more difficult. We are far removed from the caste system described by Gumperz (1958) in his village of Khalapur in India, or the clearly differentiated societies so often described by anthropologists. We are also